InfiniBand: What about it ?

Recently, there has been a lot of conversation around InfiniBand. Members of the IBTA often take our knowledge of InfiniBand technology for granted, which is why we are happy to see more exploratory discussion and education conversations happening. If you’re interested in finding out more about InfiniBand the IBTA has a number of resources for you to check out, including a product roadmap, put together by the IBTA’s members.

Additionally, we wanted to share a recent blog post by Oracle’s Neeraj Gupta, which succinctly introduces the InfiniBand technology to those who may be unfamiliar with it.

Looking forward to more discussion and education on InfiniBand in the coming weeks.

Heard the buzz word - InfiniBand ? And wondering what it is ? Here is some information to get you started.

I am quite sure that you are already familiar with more common networking technologies like Ethernet and various Wireless media these days. InfiniBand is yet another but it does not reach out to us in our daily lives as much as others and probably thats the reason you are still interested in reading about it here

InfiniBand is meant to provide interconnect for high end computing environments by providing high bandwidth under extremely low latency. In other words, it enables computing end points to exchange more data, faster. Lets compare InfiniBand with Ethernet based on various product offerings today.

I would like to point out that these are raw bandwidths and the actual throughput is usually lower which depends on messaging protocols across end points. I will talk about this more later.

In recent years of technology evolution, computing platforms’ capabilities have reached a point where they can use a better and higher speed network to communicate with peer platforms more efficiently. We refer to the term - bottlenecks, when such scenarios occur. In high demanding computing environments, InfiniBand solves this problem by allowing computers to exchange more data faster.

So, what do you need to get on this high speed data highway ? Not likely that same equipment will work. You are right !

InfiniBand requires specialized hardware equipment. Each computing end point needs an I/O card that we call as Host Channel Adapter or HCA. They connect to InfiniBand Switches using special cables that are engineered to carry your data at this high rate with precision.

Oh wow ! So, do I need to re-write my applications here ? I do not have time to do that !

I know you will ask this at this point. The answer is “no”. Before I go any further, let me just state that InfiniBand follows well known industry standard for networking and this is known as Open Systems Interconnect or OSI. This model offers seven layers and just like ethernet, they apply to InfiniBand as well. Now, let me come back to the original point. We dont need to re-write our entire applications because InfiniBand technology enables very seamless integration.

The new hardware that we just talked about integrates and presents itself to your application in a very similar way as Ethernet. Your view into the network remains same and you continue to interact with sockets comprised of IP addresses and ports.

Thats all for this blog. I will come back with more information on this later and open up the topic in details. Thanks for reading !